The roll is the official record of who belongs to the church, and the directory is the list of everyone the church keeps track of. Confusing the two is where almost every question in the church office starts: who joins, who leaves, who decides, and where all of it should live.
Read the articleA handful of people meeting in a home once a week. That is almost right, and it does not tell you what you are getting into: a small group is almost a second family, with people nobody chose, and this article has both halves of that.
The difference is the place the small group occupies: in one case it is one ministry among others, in the other it is what the life of the church runs through. Thirteen signs to check, this week, which side the routine of your church falls on.
Multiplication is grace. But a church stalls at a certain size when supervision stops seeing what happens inside the groups, and the total that reaches the pastor does not tell you what happened year by year.
Leaders stop filling it in when they learn, in practice, that it changes nothing. It is not a hard app, and it is not a lack of willingness. Six questions to find where the problem is in your church.